‘Cries From Syria’ Captures Brutality of Assad’s War on His Own People (video)

Director Evgeny Afineevsky appeared at the Brightside Screening Room in Jersey City to publicize his HBO documentary ‘Cries for Syria.’ (Photo by Anne Marie Principe)

Director Evgeny Afineevsky screened his extraordinarily powerful and disturbing HBO documentary, “Cries From Syria” at The Brightside Screening Room in Jersey City last week in his continuing campaign to publicize the horrors of Bashar al-Assad’s war against his own people.

The world has been kept in the dark from the atrocities of Assad’s regime. His campaign to suppress popular dissent has spared no one. Elementary schools and hospitals are bombed. Students are seized and tortured; some of them to never return.

Amid the fighting, children are dying of starvation. There is little food and often no water. Families who flee are forced to pay smugglers to cross the ocean in flimsy, overcrowded boats or rafts.

Refuge children only see the ocean as a cruel, terrifying, unforgiving force. When they finally reaching land, refugees are ostracized, barely fed and left to sleep in makeshift tents on city streets.

You cannot look away; you cannot say we are not responsible for others. That is the essential message of the film. Our failure to do so drives these children and young people into the grip of ISIS.

As part of the event, Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop and deputy mayor Marcos Vigil delivered a proclamation to Afineevsky to honor his work. Activists and community leaders also came out to support the event.

The documentary features footage shot by Syrian activists and citizen journalists, who have followed Assad’s bloody crackdown on public protests.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians and been killed and millions more have been displaced, creating a refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe.

HBO acquired domestic TV rights to “Cries From Syria,” before its scheduled screening at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

“This is an unabashed, unadulterated view of war,” Sheila Nevins, president, HBO Documentary Films said in a statement.

“The brutality of man’s inhumanity to man is blatantly uncovered, exposing war as it is, not as it seems to be,” she adds.

“Cries From Syria” includes the original song “Prayers for this World,” written by Diane Warren, and recorded by Cher and the West Los Angeles Children’s Choir.

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Keith Girard is Editor and Pubilsher of TheImproper, New York City’s cutting edge arts, entertainment pop culture and lifestyle Web magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of Billboard magazine and a reporter for the Washington Post among other media positions.